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A recent headline in the online Sydney Daily Telegraph ran ‘Oh, no, Jackie is back on the evil bungers’ (15 February, 2013). The celebrity scoop was that popular Sydney radio presenter Jackie O had started smoking cigarettes again, but would the reader have known that bunger was an Australian word for cigarette?
The origin of bunger meaning ‘cigarette’ is unclear. Many Australians will be familiar with the word bunger in the sense of ‘a kind of firework that explodes loudly’. This Australianism is recorded from the 1920s, and is a variation of the word banger . The firework bunger was a common feature of cracker night festivities across Australia that celebrated public holidays such as Empire Day, Guy Fawkes Day, Commonwealth Day, and King’s
(later Queen’s) Birthday. The bunger was so popular that cracker night was occasionally called bunger night . Since the bunger was shaped like a cigarette, and was lit like a cigarette, could this sense of bunger be the origin of the cigarette sense?
Another explanation for the origin of bunger might come with an earlier
Australian word for a cigarette — bumper . Bumper goes back to the late nineteenth century and usually refers to a cigarette butt. It is often found in the context of people collecting cigarette butts to retrieve the remaining tobacco to make a cigarette. The problem with positing the transformation of bumper into bunger is that it requires the nasal ‘m’ sound to change to nasal ‘n’ (plausible), and for the ‘mp’ (or ‘np’) to change to ‘ng’ (not so plausible phonetically).
The explanation of the origin of bunger therefore may lie elsewhere. Among the earliest references to the cigarette bunger in the written records is the variant lung bunger :
‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news,’ J.D. told Alex between the obligatory puff on a lung bunger . ( Sydney Morning Herald , 17
September, 1990)
A thickset man in a thickset red Volvo lights a lung bunger and crawls a few metres. ( Melbourne Age , 21 November, 1992)
It is possible that the original term was not bunger but instead was the compound lung bunger . And it is not difficult to work out why a cigarette was called a lung bunger . One sense of the word bung is ‘to close, stop, or clog up’. The early examples of lung bunger perhaps demonstrate that the term developed from the notion that cigarette smoking ‘bungs up your lungs’. If this is the case then bunger is an abbreviation of lung bunger .
The overtly negative connotation of the term lung bunger would now be unfamiliar to most people who smoke and use the term bunger . Further evidence is needed to determine whether lung bunger or the firework bunger is the most likely origin of this term.
Bunger and lung bunger are being considered for inclusion in the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary .